One always wants to attend at least two panels that happen to coincide – it’s the unfortunate Law of Conferences. Come Wednesday I wanted to attend several sessions all happening at 12:30pm: “Modern Arab Art and Its Historical and Methodological Relationships to the Post-Colonial Context” exerted a certain kind of pull, but also Creative Capital’s “Risky Business” – do not ask if I entertained fantasies of cute non-profit arts professional nerds stripping down and dancing in their Tighty Whities (no, I did not).

I arrived early and instinctively sat near the back – knee-jerk practice after years of attending boring panels and the need for easy and discrete egress – but there was no need. The conversation was equal to the complexity and seriousness of the subject at hand. By the time I remembered to survey the room it was crammed – standing room only.

“Policing the Sacred” broached the most interesting age-old conundrum of art, religion and censorship. It asked that we ourselves examine the lines between hate speech, critique, parody, and appropriation of the sacred and its symbols by artists as well as by governments. Several factors were noted as being particularly relevant now:

- An upsurge of religious values since the fall of Communist regimes; - Muslims under fire since 9/11; - The Internet and increased mobility/accessibility of artists and images, across cultures and contexts.

The panel looked at some recent instances of artworks that have been censored in the name of religion, across a range of contexts and cultures, from democracies in the West where free speech rubs up against the manipulations of the religious right, to totalitarian theocracies that appropriate religious iconography as part of broader manipulative strategies of oppression. The range of viewpoints presented was broad, by dint of the array of experiences of the artists present, which ranged from fending off and negotiating small town USA reactionaries, to fleeing the deadly persecution of dictatorships in Iran and Russia.

In her introduction, Eleanor Heartney opened by referencing the Wojnarowicz incident, and then gave us a list of recent instances of censorship and/or desecration that reflect the increased sectarianism of our post-9/11 era:

- France’s prohibition against women wearing the hijab; - The Swiss ban on minarets; - Up-tick in the desecration of Jewish grave sites; - Problems installing Nativities in public spaces in the US; - Intolerance for satires of Christianity; - The Danish cartoon flap;

The list goes on.

One recurring theme throughout history, and one that finds particular traction now according to Svetlana Mintcheva, is the rampant desire (of regimes, political manipulators, religios, etc.) to find images that “offend”, even when (usually) the offense is taken through wild misinterpretation.

For me, perhaps the most interesting set of exchanges occurred toward the end of the session as the artists aired their different personal feelings about “boundaries” (paraphrasing):

Shirin Neshat, after her pointed explication of her work as a challenge to the Iranian regime, asserted that she personally likes boundaries, and that she doesn’t think globalism as such promotes behaviors that respect them. Her example was the veil in muslim countries, and how we in the West tend to equate it rather simplistically with servitude and oppression of women. She notes: the West wants to imagine that this is one world with one set of values.

Shojah Azari erupted with (in reference to the outcry over the perceived desecration of books in Richard Kamler’s art): “I would like to burn all the books” (laughter). “I was raised an atheist, at war with religious orthodoxy…” He went on to describe the repeated incapacity of Westerners to accept the fact that he is both Iranian and atheist (post-9/11, assumptions run rampant).

Richard Kamler: “I’m not that into boundaries”. He notes: they change as we grow, and contexts shift. One needs to look at religious boundaries with respect in order to change them. For this task, our notion of boundaries must be fluid.

Boryana Rossa: Agrees with Shirin’s take on boundaries – they are important.

Svetlana Mintcheva: Policing the boundaries – we all have them. Interesting that most of the artists censored by the Catholic church are CATHOLICS (laughter). There’s something about Catholicism that makes Catholics want to go against it…. Hate speech laws are dangerous, because they could conceivably be used to silence people and to suppress dissent. Once you have such legislation, how do you control who controls it? Such a law – you would want it to serve certain purposes; but you have to imagine how it would be wielded in the hands of oppressors.

Come do your holiday shopping at the ecoartspace office in Soho! We will be exhibiting the remaining artworks donated to our Spring benefit What Matters Most. Works can also be viewed and purchased online HERE and are ONLY $150 each. We will also have additional prints, books, stickers and select paintings and sculpture. Perfect holiday gifts!

AND, on December 10th Amy Lipton and Patricia Watts will moderate a panel discussion:

Agents of Change: Artists and Sustainability focusing on five artists, Brandon Ballengee, Jackie Brookner, Eve Andree Laramee, Stacy Levy, and Tattfoo Tan who explore issues of sustainability and ecology, often to create community-based or public art projects. Their work sits at the nexus between art, life, science, and nature and finds direct, effective ways to engage its viewers. These artists use diverse methods–including dialogue and interaction—to deal with everyday life situations and solve real-world challenges. They often work collaboratively on multi-disciplinary projects that include scientists, ecologists, botanists, landscape architects, and engineers to create large-scale works or interventions in the social sphere. This discussion will focus on their intention to activate the public into making positive changes in their own lives and communities.

[Many of us are] interested in / concerned about the Wikileaks situation and its broader context, including both its support and the legal and technological efforts to silence it. Recent events have raised many difficult and important questions including:

In the digital age, should all information be free?

Does good government require secrecy, or more openness?

Can we trust private internet service providers to defend free speech?

Is Wikileaks a terrorist organization, or the beginning of a new kind of transnational investigative journalism?

Join this fantastic array of journalists, bloggers, futurists and policy mavens for a very timely

"Joy Garnett, artist, blogger and curator, lives and works in New York. Her paintings, based on the source images that she gathers from the Internet, examine the apocalyptic sublime at the intersections of media, politics and culture. For the past decade, Garnett has edited NEWSgrist, a blog that focuses on the politics of art and culture in the digital age."

The
paintings and drawings presented in the exhibition, ‘China Three Gorges
Project,’ are an artist’s response to The “China Yangtze Three Gorges
Project,” the monumental and controversial public works currently under
construction in China’s Yangtze River valley. The largest
hydropower-complex in the world, the Three Gorges Dam has taken several
decades to build, engendering the razing of villages, the submersion of
factories and toxic waste dumps, the flooding of arable lands, and the
displacement of over one million inhabitants. Evacuation mismanagement
and ballooning construction costs have raised the specter of government
corruption. In recent years, as much of the industrialized world has
increasingly turned toward new forms of renewable energy that foster
sustainability and environmental stewardship, and even as China claims
leadership in this nascent global green movement, the Three Gorges Dam
continues to broadcast signals of conflicted priorities. All told,
construction of the dam has come to represent China's worst
environmental nightmare and a monument to obsolete ambitions.

Close
to 100 official public relations photographs that document the
transformation of the site can be found on the Three Gorges Development
Corporation website: http://www.ctgpc.com.
Starting with images of the river valley in its pristine state and
moving through the various stages of construction, these photographs
attempt to signal the project’s inevitability by offering us a
semblance of continuity, positioning the deconstruction of the
landscape and construction of the dam against the backdrop of the
ancient Chinese landscape. But rather than evoke the centuries-old
tradition of Chinese landscape painting, the photographs veer towards
soft-focus calendar art kitsch, Socialist Realist-inflected
construction sites, factory interiors, and sci-fi laboratories,
unwittingly evoking China’s part in the mass production of cheap
consumer goods and dated notions of ‘futurist’ techno-utopias.

As
a visual response to this cycle of propaganda, the works in the
exhibition chart the methodical evisceration of the river valley,
rendering the image of the landscape, once immutable, as a fragile
substrate to be broken up violently in a triumph of engineering.
Through these two linked bodies of work, paintings and drawings, this
embattled landscape is apprehended through gestural interpretations of
the public relations photographs. The paintings, numbering thirteen
altogether, utilize the Western medium of oil on canvas to reinvent the
candy-colored source images as expressionist tableaux, while the works
on paper, numbering sixty-three in total, exhaustively track the
deconstruction of the landscape, eventually verging on complete
abstraction.